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AMSTUD 178:Ethnicity and Dissent in United States Art and Literature (ARTHIST 178, ARTHIST 378)

The role of the visual arts of the U.S. in the construction and contesting of racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Focus is on artists and writers from the 18th century to 1990s. How power, domination, and resistance work historically. Topics include: minstrelsy and the invention of race; mass culture and postmodernity; hegemony and language; memory and desire; and the borderlands.

AMSTUD 183:Re- Imagining American Borders (CSRE 183, FEMGEN 183)

In this third volatile and violent year of the Trump presidency, American borders of all kinds seem to be dangerously tight. This is seen in the literal horror of immigrant detention centers filled with hungry, sick children taken from parents, ongoing mass incarceration and police attacks on young black and brown men and gendered violence targeting trans Americans and pro-choice movements. Additionally urban and rural antagonisms and constant social media anger with a kind of newly brutal linguistic framing are all underscoring a vision of an America of intractable difference. The hopeful transformation from the 2018 elections, which is having enormous reverberations in the present 2020 presidential campaigns, is interestingly also based in a discourse of difference. This course investigates sources of these borderlines and most crucially how novelists, filmmakers, poets, visual artists and essayists perceive racial, ethnic, gender, religious, sexual orientation and class borders in t
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In this third volatile and violent year of the Trump presidency, American borders of all kinds seem to be dangerously tight. This is seen in the literal horror of immigrant detention centers filled with hungry, sick children taken from parents, ongoing mass incarceration and police attacks on young black and brown men and gendered violence targeting trans Americans and pro-choice movements. Additionally urban and rural antagonisms and constant social media anger with a kind of newly brutal linguistic framing are all underscoring a vision of an America of intractable difference. The hopeful transformation from the 2018 elections, which is having enormous reverberations in the present 2020 presidential campaigns, is interestingly also based in a discourse of difference. This course investigates sources of these borderlines and most crucially how novelists, filmmakers, poets, visual artists and essayists perceive racial, ethnic, gender, religious, sexual orientation and class borders in this country as they may re-imagine difference possibly via Vijay Prashad's polyculturalism or Gloria Anzaldùa's borderlands. Texts include those of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Boots Riley, Dee Rees, Ryan Coogler, Nelly Rosario, Janice Lobo Sapigao, Layli Long Soldier, Naomi Shihab Nye, Edwidge Danticat, Sherman Alexie, Shailja Patel, Kara Walker, and the podcast Ear Hustle, narratives created and produced from inside San Quentin, along with Shane Bauer's undercover expose of an American prison. Course guests will include actors and writers from the acclaimed web series, The North Pole, showing parts of the new second season of biting, humorous stories of gentrification, racism and immigration issues in West Oakland. And the Bay Area founder of the only women-run, inclusive mosque in the US, Rabi¿a Keeble, will speak with us about an American Islam with a Muslim community that embraces difference. Course work includes active discussion, journal entries, one comparative analytical essay and a creative final project/with analytical paper examining personal or community identities.

AMSTUD 186A:American Hauntings

Cultural, psychological, social, and political dynamics of haunting in American literature, from the early national period to the late 20th century. Sources include ghost stories and other instances of supernatural, emotional, or mental intervention. Authors include Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison, and Stephen King.

This class works collaboratively with a local juvenile hall to use civic engagement and performance to explore the aesthetic, cultural and legal issues in the lives of incarcerated youth. In the process students gain an understanding of incarceration on an immediate and personal scale. Taught jointly by a Dance Studies scholar and a lawyer specializing in Juvenile Justice, we will consider what unique understandings are possible if we position the arts as central to an exploration of punishment, rehabilitation and recidivism in America. The course will examine case studies, historical and contemporary narratives about the social, imaginative and behavioral change possible through arts programs in prison.Half of the class meetings will be in Hillcrest Juvenile Hall in San Mateo, where our class will join with a group of 13-18 year old youths currently detained there. Dance will be used to help shape their individual expressive voices, and ours, through collaborative hip hop dance classes. Books to be read are
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson, and
Last Chance in Texas by John Hubner.

2019-2020 Spring

AMSTUD 214:The American 1960s: Thought, Protest, and Culture

The meaning of the American 60s emphasizing ideas, culture, protest, and the new sensibility that emerged. Topics: black protest, the new left, the counterculture, feminism, the new literature and journalism of the 60s, the role of the media in shaping dissent, and the legacy of 60s protest. Interpretive materials from film, music, articles, and books.

AMSTUD 244:The Visual Culture of the American Home Front, 1941-1945 (ARTHIST 244)

How does home front of WWII look now? What sort of meanings appear with the vantage of more than sixty years' distance? Examining Hollywood films from those years -films made during the war but mostly not directly about the war - the seminar focuses on developing students' abilities to write emotion-based criticism and history. Weekly short papers, each one in response to a film screening, are required. Among the films screened: Shadow of a Doubt, Gaslight, I Walked with a Zombie, The Best Years of Our Lives.

This seminar focuses on the interrelationships between social constructions of race, and social interpretations of religion in America. How have assumptions about race shaped religious worldviews? How have religious beliefs shaped racial attitudes? How have ideas about religion and race contributed to notions of what it means to be "American"? We will look at primary and secondary sources, and at the historical development of ideas and practices over time.

Last offered: Winter 2018
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-ED, WAY-SI

ANTHRO 12:Anthropology and Art

Modernity. How the concept of art appears timeless and commonsensical in the West, and with what social consequences. Historicizing the emergence of art. Modernist uses of primitive, child art, asylum, and outsider art.

ANTHRO 145B:Reinventing the Other: Greeks, Romans, Barbarians

Ancient ethnography was a highly conventionalized tradition stretching from "the father of History," Herodotus, to the last historian of the ancient world, Procopius. We will read selections of these two authors' works as well as of Sallust, Tacitus, and lesser known ones. Within various theoretical frameworks'rhetorical, anthropological, structuralist we will reconstruct the shifting images of The Other, explore what they tell us about their producers, and reflect on what ancient ethnography contributed to its modern descendant.

Last offered: Winter 2013
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum

ANTHRO 162:Indigenous Peoples and Environmental Problems (ANTHRO 262)

The social and cultural consequences of contemporary environmental problems. The impact of market economies, development efforts, and conservation projects on indigenous peoples, emphasizing Latin America. The role of indigenous grass roots organizations in combating environmental destruction and degradation of homeland areas.